I would like to respond to two of The Times Argus’ recent editorials regarding the Moretown Landfill, or more appropriately the “Moretown dump.”

I have lived on Route 2 in Moretown for 30 years. My husband and I built our home here and raised our two sons here. We have a lot of emotional investment in this property.

The dump as we know it now did not exist 30 years ago. We did not build our home here anticipating a place where we would be forced to smell “landfill gases” every single day. The odor is not even random as it could have been described even five years ago. It now is constant, daily and so excessive that it literally affects us every day of our lives.

No one, even the engineers from Weston & Sampson who have developed the odor control burn-off and elimination process at the dump, can tell us what we are inhaling. They literally don’t know. They refer to it as “landfill gas,” which is apparently a combination of a host of different things. What they are when we inhale them, or what they break down to, is apparently either unknown or undisclosed.

I am aware that the dump has put out a lot of information recently about loss of revenues to the town of Moretown, as well as disposal issues for the entire state. There are solutions to this problem. There are two other permitted sites in the state of Vermont that could be used, when it becomes necessary. The state is also moving toward a zero-waste concept. Both of these could alleviate the concerns that are being circulated.

The dump has been operated without any restraint for many years. They have also had many years to address and perfect their off-site odor issues. They either do not actually have technology available to do this, or an even worse case scenario they “won’t” do it.

They are being heavy-handed at this point, because it appears that they are not going to be allowed to freewheel through the process. It is clearly not the fault of the neighbors that trash will have to be handled differently or that some of the personnel will be laid off. This is a product of thumbing their noses at the concerns of neighbors, who had been very understanding of them in the past. They have had ample opportunity to address neighbors’ concerns, almost two decades in fact, and they haven’t. The reasoning doesn’t matter at this point.